"I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected."
- Abraham Lincoln Letter to Albert G. Hodges. (April 4, 1864)
(The letter memorializes a conversation Lincoln had with Kentucky Governor Thomas E. Bramlette, Albert Hodges, editor of the Frankfort Commonwealth and Archibald Dixon, who served in the U.S. Senate from 1852 to 1855. Bramlette protested to Lincoln the recruiting of black regiments in Kentucky.)

"The number-one thing you want to make the user interface be is a learning environment..." - Alan Kay "A conversation with Alan Kay" ACMQueue (December 27, 2004)

"Being a little scared is good. If you don't work at the edge of your comfort zone, your comfort zone will shrink." - Alan Oppenheim"Oppenheim the Unorthodox"Technology Review (May/June 2011)

"The model for personal development is antithetical to the model for professional success...
You must embrace failure. You must admit what is. You must find out what you're capable of doing, and what you're not capable of doing. That is the only way to deal with the issue of success and failure..."- Milton GlaserFear of Failure (2011)

"Getting good at a thing involves seeking out opportunities to feel small."
- Rebecca MurphyA new chapter (June 1, 2011)

"There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: You could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination." - Paul GrahamGood and Bad Procrastination (December 2005)

"I used to tell my [medical] students that they must never refuse a procedure based on never having seen it before. They must just go for it. Out there in the real world...you won't have someone to hold your hand just because you haven't seen a procedure before."
- Bongi
"The Best" Other Things Amanzi (December 18, 2008)

"If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company..."
"I believe if you don’t have that set of things in your corporate culture, then you can’t do large-scale invention. You can do incremental invention, which is critically important for any company. But it is very difficult — if you are not willing to be misunderstood. People will misunderstand you. Any time you do something big, that’s disruptive — Kindle, AWS — there will be critics."
- Jeff BezosAmazon, Inc. shareholder meeting (June 2011)

"All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life."
- Steve WozniakFounders at Work

"Do not write any line of code unless you absolutely need it right now and your program will suffer for the lack of it. Do not write routines speculatively. Do not write abstraction layers you don’t need right now. If an optimization will add any complexity whatsoever, even a subtraction, resist it. You will be sorry in five years when your code is riddled with potentially-buggy code that you never really needed to write."
- Lawrence KestelootEvery Line Is a Potential Bug

"The best creative people want to work for the best clients. If you are a client who doesn’t appreciate great work, or a client who won’t take risks and try new stuff, or a client who can’t get excited about the creative, then you’re the wrong kind of client."
- John ScullyJohn Scully on Steve JobsCult of Mac

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”- Attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” - Henry David ThoreauWalden (1854)

The misquoted source of “good artists borrow, great artists steal”.

"One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest."
- Thomas Stearns Eliot"Philip Massinger"The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1921)